Try Yahoo Pipes

Now here's a new way to keep up with anything interesting without actually having to search for it online. Try Yahoo Pipes. Here in Singapore, I try to keep up with news from my old hometown, Calcutta (Kolkata). Besides speaking to my wife, who teaches there, and browsing Calcutta newspapers such as The Telegraph, now I can also get news from various sources through Yahoo Pipes. It pipes a steady stream of information about any topic you choose, collecting the information from blogs and news sites and everything else online.

Yes, Google Alert does the same thing. But that's delivered to your email account. Yahoo Pipes comes as a news feed, which means it's being updated all the time. And you don't have to check your email to get the information. I simply go to Bloglines or My Yahoo to get the latest news.

I have set up Yahoo Pipes for Calcutta and Singapore. ( I want to know what's being said by the bloggers and foreign media and not just the Singapore newspapers.) And the Singapore Pipe is working just fine. The one for Calcutta is buggy. But give it time. The Yahoo Pipes were launched only two or three days ago.

Yahoo Pipes goes even further than Google News, Pubsub and Technorati. You can use them to get a news feed on any topic of your choice, but can you publish the feed on your own website? You can with Yahoo Pipes.

And you don't have to be programmer to use Yahoo Pipes. All I did was go to Yahoo Pipes website, browse the readymade Pipes and click on the one called Aggregated News Alerts. That took me to a page which said, "Configure this pipe", and asked "What news are you looking to track"? In the search box, I typed "Singapore" and clicked. That created a Pipe Preview showing a collection of stories about Singapore. I clicked on the Subscribe button. Up popped more buttons giving me the choice to subscribe through Bloglines, My Yahoo and various other news readers. I chose Bloglines and My Yahoo and my Pipes were installed.

Actually, one doesn't need a news reader to read the Pipes. Click on the "Get as RSS" button. That creates a version you can publish or read on your web browser.